Existentialism with Grandma

      When you tell yourself the story of your own life, there are undoubtedly moments to which you, in retrospect, ascribe a certain significance, because they make the rest of the plot make more sense. These moments become more brightly lit during the editing process of selective memory.    

     When I was about eight, some friends of the family were over and they were, I don’t know, moving something.  We were out on the driveway, and I guess I had gotten in the way, so the dad, who is this giant burly man, turns to me and says,

     
“Blah blah blah, KITTEN.”

   
  I was stunned.

    
“Kitten”.  No shit. He called me “kitten”.  I swooned.

 
   I was not a “kitten”y kid. Thanks to Dorothy Hamill, the woman who made my ugly polyester pants into ugly polyester shorts every other summer, and our family optician, Dr. Doisy, who did not intervene with “Hey, maybe matching eyeglasses are not the best way to say, ‘Dad, you’re my hero’”, I had a very un-kittenlike thing going.  My parents never said kitten-sweetie-honey stuff. They both had that Old Country, rationed butter and factory work demeanor.  My parents were “Move, damn it”-type people, and they wouldn’t have been any different if I had been the ACTUAL Hello Kitty.

     
Butter has never been hot commodity in my lifetime, so I feel more comfortable expressing affection in a casual and routine kind of way.  My own “Move, damn it” is tempered with parade toss-handfuls of “sweet pea” and “jellybean”.  Natasha and Gretchen, the family German Shepherds, became Zucchini Squash and Gherkin the Pickle Dog. My own cat, the suitably feral Beaner (show name: LolitaLula Bean Dean) became ‘Ner and then 'Nerbil, because I felt sorry for the oft-neglected second syllable. Jack has a million little nicknames, but they’re secret. Some of that stuff ya gotta keep secret … gotta keep it close.

     So there’s that.

    
With Jack around, my kitten-calling factor was unstoppable. Inevitably, “Grandma” was going to get replaced by something better. “The Gummer” just showed up one day like it was written on her birth certificate. Nothing was said about it, and “The Gummer” settled in. It was perfect.

 
 In late 2010, The Gummer suddenly asked, “Why the hell am I ‘The Gummer’?” 

   “Because it’s easier to say than Grandma.“

    I smiled like the cat who got the canary,  “… and because it makes you sound like you don’t have any teeth.”

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   In 1994, I finished my undergrad at the University of Illinois, shoved a bunch of stuff into a “Mork and Mindy”-rejected silver Geo Storm, and drove to Athens, GA.

  

 The bullshit version of the story involves some crap about the short period of time before one makes a commitment to a career and a family...and then some English department, deep fried and Flannery O’Connorized spiel about the Southern aesthetic. The truth is that I didn’t know what I was doing, but I thought it was fucking fantastic that no one could tell me to stop doing it.  I wanted “Life’s Rich Pageant”, not the “Little Miss Horseradish Pageant”.  (Collinsville, Illinois is the Horseradish Capital of the World and The City with that Weird Catsup Bottle Water Tower. When these two claims-to-fame are combined, the result is a slightly better than Red Lobster-caliber cocktail sauce of culture. It’s good, but it’s not THAT good.)

  I lived in Athens for 15 years. It was amazing… until it wasn’t. By 2009, it was time to go back to the ‘ville. My father had died suddenly. My brother had signed a ten-year lease for a VERY small apartment in a VERY gated community. My life had sort of careened all over the place, and I had settled in to watch it all from a ditch somewhere. It was time to go. My mom was alone and missed her grandson. Besides, she would be able to help us out. I could go back to teaching. I could start over. It was time.

   It’s about a ten-hour drive from Athens to Collinsville. It took me at least a year and a half to make the drive. On March 22, 2009, we walked into my mother’s shrine of a kitchen to find a greyish molten blob in the middle of the floor. She had, you see, tried to dry out the newspaper in the oven…like you do… and then she forgot about it until she smelled smoke. She tried to throw it outside, but since it was ON FIRE, it kept burning. She got scared and dropped it, melting the linoleum or whatever crap flooring they had selected without my input.

 She was doing crazy old people stuff.  It was good that we were home. 

 The comedy of horrors that results from living with a preschooler and an old(er) person was evident from the beginning:

 “Little kids and old people sure like nightlights.” – March 23, 2009

  I realized that the only way to survive was to write it all down.

 On March 29, 2009, I posted:

“Today's "Science Projects By Grandma": Move a heavy safe using a beach towel. Solution: Remove Grandma and beach towel from room. Move heavy safe. Smile.”

The Gummer Chronicles were born.

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